Well done BT!

Pleased to submit a cheerful story. Iíve been very happy with BT since August 2010 after TalkTalk had cut me off for weeks. As a light user I think the BT package of unlimited calls, line rental (paid in advance) and BB is good value at about £25 pm.

I feared the worst when BT told me our exchange was due for upgrade during April. So many Ďupgradesí either cost more or bring trouble. BT said there would be a brief outage, after which we would have a more reliable and perhaps slightly faster connection.

By that evening my BB speed doubled from average 4.5Mb to over 9Mb, and itís stayed there. Well done BT.

Re: Well done BT!

Thanks Spex, I thought there might be further improvement available but present connection meets my needs.

Not a techie, but from this brilliant and helpful website I know I should not have a 15m extension from master socket in hall to my home office! I did disconnect the ring wire. Old type socket, dating from house construction in 1968; we're 3km from exchange with 150m underground cable from cabinet to pole, thence 30m overhead line to house gable, then 10m to socket in hall.

I did disconnect the extension and try my Home Hub and my earlier Linksys router plugged into the incoming socket in the hall, no difference to speed. Would it be worth trying with the upgraded exchange?

Re: Well done BT!

Sometimes there is a difference in the stats that is not immediately apparent from just a speedtest, hence taking the attenuation, connection speed, and noise margin figures before and after any changes

Re: Well done BT!

If that 15m extension cable between the master socket and the home office is a plug-in one, it almost certainly contains a ring wire. People have been know to pull out its T3 contact at the master end, or cover it with a tiny strip of insulation tape.

I see that attenuation has risen from 27dBm before to 33 after upgrade. All these figures have remained fairly constant.

RobertoS, my extension is 24-yr-old four core cable from a BT-installed extension. I paired the two pairs in effect making a twin cable. I did try the hub direct into the entry socket (old type, about 65mm square) and it made no difference, would it be worth trying now that exchange is upgraded?.

I know it will offend the experts but I've left the setup alone since dialup days, if it's not broke don't fix it! Thanks for your always interesting and helpful comments.

Re: Well done BT!

Well your old figures before the upgrade are just as bad. Should have full 8 Meg sync on ADSL.
The rise in attenuation is to be expected due to changes in frequency bands used with ADSL2+.

And how are things when you run them from the test socket, bypassing this four core cable? A lot depends on how you wired it and the cable itself. So check from the test socket, accessed by taking master frontplate off.